Multivarious wants to make Columbus a video game city

The 2018 movie “Ready Player One”—and the book it was based on—imagined Columbus as a city in 2045 transformed into a wasteland. Residents found an escape from the dystopian landscape of their lives by playing video games.

Chris Volpe, CEO and President of Multivarious—a local company focused on developing video games and creative technologies—has a more appealing vision for how gaming can become part of the city’s future. What if we make video games a signature industry here? What if we think of them not as an escape, but instead as a draw to attract top design talent, innovative thinkers, and world-class competitors? What would that future look like?

If Volpe’s efforts are successful, we may soon find out.

“There’s no city right now in the Midwest—and in most of the country, to be honest—that has a claim on this industry, outside of like New York and California,” Volpe says. “For seven years I’ve been beating this drum that this can be the place for it.”

“Beating the drum” means more than just talking to the right people; it means building coalitions. Multivarious has given Volpe the platform to do both. Founded in 2011, the company has been a leader in the gaming space ever since. It has developed its own games, (including the dinosaurs-meet- robots puzzle game Hatch-It, and the forthcoming Kickstarter-funded No Mercy,) and introduced relevant technologies to partners in the education and healthcare fields. Additionally, in 2013, Volpe founded GDEX, an annual gaming convention that unites players, developers, and enthusiasts from across the country every fall. He credits the Central Ohio Gamedev Group— known as COGG—for inspiring and supporting these projects.

Whether it’s the explosive growth of gaming events, the reverberations of Volpe’s drumbeat finally reaching city hall, or a combination of both, the idea of Columbus as a video game city is gaining some traction. “[We’re] focusing on creating Columbus as the center of industry for gaming and esports,” he said.

That means Multivarious is moving away from its traditional client-service model, where its developers partnered with local businesses to use video game technology to improve services, and towards a leadership role in projects that—if fully realized—will literally change the game here.

“We are looking at creating Columbus’ professional esports team, getting that up and running over the next year or two,” Volpe said. A professional team needs a professional playing eld, (see the recent battle over Crew stadium if you have any doubts,) and Volpe imagines building one for esports, analogous to what he calls “the Hollywood of gaming.”

Rounding out his three-part vision are strong developers, crucial both for keeping the systems running and creating new cutting-edge content. Multivarious already hosts an incubator for new developers, and plans to expand it in the near future.

“There isn’t a lot of precedent for some of this,” he said. “We are looking to create an actual team around certain titles—we haven’t announced what those titles are going to be yet—where those players are paid athletes, so they get a salary, they get benefits.” He projects that by making these investments, the Columbus brand will grow “into a national leader in the space.”

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With so much growth already occurring in the city, it’s fair to ask whether esports and games are the right industry to put Columbus on the map. Volpe is confident that they are.

“This is an explosive industry that is on the forefront of technology,” he said.

“I spend a lot of time trying to get people excited and realize, like no, this isn’t just like a silly fad. The writing’s already on the wall here. And whatever city or state is willing to put in time, effort, and money, is gonna have probably at least a 10-year advantage.”

That advantage would buy us an early stake in one of the most lucrative industries out there. “The game development side alone makes more revenue globally than music and movies combined, times two,” Volpe said. This added up to $137 billion in 2018, with esports accounting for a billion- dollar slice of that pie.

Further, Volpe says we have the infrastructure in place for the growth to happen here. “We have some of the best programmers, designers, developers, artists out there.” Volpe predicts there would also be an uptick in services related to growth in the industry, including legal, marketing, and public relations.

With the groundwork seemingly already in place, the biggest hurdle to realizing this vision might be overcoming negative stereotypes about gamers and the gaming community. “A lot of people get stuck in this like, ‘gamers are 16-year-old white kids in their parent’s basement’ thing, and it’s not true. The average age of a gamer is 38. When you look at gamers broadly across the spectrum, it’s about 60 to 40 percent male-to-female,” Volpe said.

And while high-profile incidents—such as the “Gamergate” debacle of a few years ago—can give gamers a bad name, Volpe maintains that, in respect to diversity, “we have some of the most welcoming communities that you’ll find.”

As someone who’s considered himself part of the gaming community for most of his life, Volpe leads by example in this area. He gives a platform to gamers who defy the kid-in-the basement stereotype, organizing panels for GDEX with titles like Women in Gaming and Gaming While Black.

At the same time, dealing with a younger audience in much of his work, part of Volpe’s role is constructively growing the community and finding space to educate. “If they do something or say something, we give them the opportunity to correct themselves,” he said. Still, he notes the expectations at GDEX and COGG events are very clear, and certain behaviors are never tolerated.

While he acknowledges that it’s up to members of the community to police themselves a little bit, they’re also dealing with representation in the media that focuses on the negative.

“I’ve only been approached twice by local television in Columbus to talk about gaming; both were about video game violence. We’ve never been approached about how much money we made for Nationwide Children’s Hospital—which is hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of the past 10 years—we’ve never been approached about our educational efforts, our reaching out to low SES (socioeconomic status) students, our diversity and inclusion work.”

Further, the utility of video games for other fields is often overlooked. Volpe shared an example of a program developed for Children’s Hospital using the Microsoft Kinect to support kids with muscular dystrophy. Multivarious created a game that young patients could play, making the process fun for them. At the same time, “we are getting clinical grade accuracy on all of their measurements per second. We’re able to make measurements faster than a clinician would be able to.” Incredibly, these results are achieved on a $150 device, an amazing bargain in the healthcare field.

This, then, is the vision: Columbus as a leader in an innovative multi-billion dollar industry. Smart and talented people working and developing here. Positive therapies and educational opportunites rooted in technology. All this, plus all kinds of games to watch and play. This is a plan for the city’s future that I can get behind. And the best part? Unlike Ready Player One, no one has to live in the stacks.

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